


Buddhapada

by NothingEnough



Series: like a bird gone to roost (twin peaks) [1]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Framing Story, Gen, Haunting, My First AO3 Post, My First Work in This Fandom, Post-Series, Series Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 22:37:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NothingEnough/pseuds/NothingEnough
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andy believes his bathroom is haunted--but what is a ghost?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Then what sort of being are you?

**Author's Note:**

> April 13 2015: This story is not for sale. All my fanworks are, were, and shall be free of cost. If you see it for sale or on a for-pay-only website, the persons selling it are fraudsters.

"I think the concussion's messing with you, Andy," Harry said at nine-oh-nine in the morning.

"I didn't notice anything," Lucy said at nine-thirteen.

"Not now, Andy. We traced him to Eugene, I've got a flight to catch," Hawk said at ten-forty-two.

"... dessert?" Norma said at twelve-oh-seven.

"I suppose it is possible, yet I hesitate to advise you unless I experience it myself," Major Briggs said at twelve-twenty.

"I don't believe in ghosts," Lucy said at two-fifty-three, and he gave up.

***

Andy Taylor expected to run into a wall of skepticism. He knew most of his friends and fellow officers didn't take him seriously. Nobody remembered that he'd figured out the map. Or they didn't like thinking about what happened to Agent Cooper after the map got figured out.

If Cooper going away (the man in Eugene wasn't Cooper, and all the fingerprints and DNA tests in the universe couldn't convince Andy otherwise) was the only tragedy to strike his town that year, they might have soldiered on, depressed but determined to carry on their friend's investigation. But no. Andy drew a mental picture of a paper chain, circles of green and blue construction paper. On the first link he wrote _Laura Palmer's death_ with white crayon, and the chain spooled backwards and forwards, each link written with a crime, an agony, a cruel murder, an untimely death, a disappearance.

The chain went on forever in both directions.

Andy had very few paper links with his name on them. Mostly, him finding the carnage inflicted on somebody else, which wasn't the same as being the target. He had an embarrassment of good luck, he was a papa-to-be, but then again, that gave him a lot to lose if Killer Dale came back to town. So Andy kept his head down. He didn't complain about no one remembering his deductive feats during Cooper's last case. He did his best to let it go, and figure out how to earn everyone's respect again.

Telling them "There's a ghost in my bathroom", as it turned out, earned nobody's respect. Even though it was true.

***

Andy didn't know much about ghosts, other than what could be learned from his older brother's subscription to _Tales from the Crypt_. This had to be the strangest ghostlike behavior he'd ever heard of. Ghosts ought to be terrifying, vicious, possessing people and breaking glasses, that sort of thing. Whatever, or whoever, was haunting the bathroom, it wasn't bloody.

Andy's house was built five years before indoor toilets were standard in Twin Peaks. Accordingly, he had two small bathrooms attached to the master bedroom. The original bathroom contained a spacious walk-in shower, a cabinet for toiletries, and a frameless mirror bolted to the wall above the sink.

One morning, while Lucy slept, Andy took a long shower. Since he was alone, he turned up the heat til the water scalded. By the time he hopped out onto his green bath-mat, Andy was three shades of red. Steam rolled through the air, water rolled like tears down plaster cheeks. The mirror neatly censored Andy into a beige-pink blur. A frosting of water covered the entire mirror, except for two ovals in the middle.

Andy blinked. The steam thinned out a little, and the impressions drawn into the glaze of water cleared up. Footprints. They were footprints. He imagined somebody doing a handstand in front of the mirror, bracing their feet on the mirror, leaving a perfect set of footprints in the condensation. Whoever did that, it wasn't Lucy, these footprints belonged either to a fully-grown man or to a woman with feet about five sizes larger than his fiancee.

He stood and wondered til the heat drained out of the room.

***

Now that he saw the obvious footprints, Andy started noticing subtle ones. He got in the habit of hanging his head when he left of the shower, watching every step he took, and usually, he watched a thicket of footprints spring up around his own sparse trail. Sometimes they walked in a straight, but skipping line up the wall. Sometimes they showed up on the ceiling. Often on the mirror. Andy felt instinctively that this wasn't a spy. Nothing watched him in the shower. What he was seeing, he thought, could be the ghost of a ghost. Something came around when Andy wasn't here and left a trail for Andy to uncover, like holding a note written in invisible ink up to a candle.

His nature was to tolerate what he didn't understand as long as possible, and Andy tried with the footprints, honest he did. But it didn't stop there.

Andy usually shaved in the other bathroom, but curiosity got the better of him after six days. Andy brought his disposable razor and his shaving cream into his shower-room. He worked quietly for some minutes, and finally, he had to admit it. Something had changed in here. Somebody was peeping on him.

His eyes focused on the mirror itself, rather than his mostly-shaved jaw, and then, on the rest of the reflection. Behind him was the linen cabinet. The fourth slat on the right-hand door was broken. Behind this broken slat, in the shadows, Andy saw a set of eyes.

"God no!", Andy said, and collapsed to the floor. The tiles were warm.

***

One concussion, one visit from Doc Hayward, one order to take sick leave from Sheriff Truman, and one order to stay in bed from Lucy later, and Andy was alone at home for most of three days.

He should be scared, shouldn't he? He'd fallen to the floor in a hectic attempt at getting out of those eyes' line of sight. But he couldn't possibly do that anyway, and he'd hurt himself trying to escape it. He thought of whether or not those eyes were friendly. After a serious scouring of his memory, Andy decided they were. The irises weren't blood-red or, worse, totally blank. They were dark, sad, too wise. And again, they weren't really there. They hadn't widened when Andy screamed, or watched him when he fell. He was sure of it.

On the third day, Lucy permitted him to take a shower, admitting that Andy smelled like old cheddar when he went without for too long. He shaved in the shower-room. He noticed the eyes again when he finished his left sideburn.

"Hello," he said.

He waved his hand in front of them.

Nothing. But he knew he was wrong about one thing. He was being watched right now. This was no ghost of a ghost, but the ghost himself. Or herself. Or whoever.

***

Pete wasn't a volunteer or a deputy, yet he spent a few hours every day at the station. Like Lucy, Andy, and everybody who knew Windom Earle, Pete no longer played chess. He and Lucy worked through a few board games before settling on mah-johnng. The day after Andy told everybody about his haunted bathroom, Pete heard about it from Lucy.

When Andy returned from lunch, Pete was there at the reception desk, setting up the mah-johnng board. "Hey, Pete," said the deputy.

"Hey, Deputy," said Pete. "I know a few things about ghosts."

"... oh?" Andy gave Pete a blank look.

"Uh-huh. We've got so many. You've just seen one of 'em." The porcelain click of tiles. "Josie's in the Great Northern. But I can't see her anymore."

"Gosh, I'm sorry," he said. "What happened?"

"... I asked her a question." More soft clicks, a shudder as a wanzu tile skittered like a beetle over the board. Number four. "Josie's really there, but what I saw wasn't. Josie's in the wood."

"I don't get it," Andy said.

He sighed. "Then listen, chucklehead. Josie's haunting the Northern--but when I saw her walking the halls of the Northern at midnight, that wasn't her. It's like there were two ghosts of Josie. The real one trapped in the walls, and a fake one who walked around and knocked paintings crooked. When I saw her walking, I wasn't sure if she was really Josie, or something that looked like her. So I asked her a question I didn't know the answer to. She vanished. The real Josie's still here, I can feel her, but the fake one's gone."

Andy pressed a hand to the glass separating Pete from the foyer. "What did you ask?"

***

Andy punched out early, at three-nineteen (Harry believed he wasn't quite right after the concussion). He went right home, grabbed something from his kitchen, and brought it into his bedroom. Once there, he unloaded his pistol, checked the chamber, locked up the ammo, locked up the pistol, and removed his badge.

He picked up what he'd grabbed from the kitchen, and toted it into the shower-room. The light buzzed, hummed on, fluttered out, came back entirely. No visible footprints anywhere. On the other hand, he saw the eyes at once, shy enough to hide in his linen-cabinet, not so shy as to disguise what they were doing. Creepy. Sad.

"I need to know if you're real," he said. Shrugged. Locked the door. "I'm gonna ask you something. Then I'm gonna turn on the shower. You're gonna write the answer on the mirror."

He tore open the top of the Rice-a-Roni box, tossed the packets of spice into the sink. Poured a fistful of brown rice and vermicelli into his hand. Closed his hand, gently, didn't want to crush them.

"How many grains of rice am I holding?" Andy said.

He stood quietly for two minutes until he remembered he had to turn the shower on. Once the water was running, he felt a little stupid and nervous--now that he was in a slowly-heating bathroom, cradling a fistful of rice and staring at a mirror, the ridiculousness hit home.

What would Lucy say if she got home?

Tears foiled his vision. He choked back a sob, cleared his throat, wiped his eyes with his free hand, looked at the mirror.

_Fifty-one._

***

"And how many were you holding?" Pete said the next day.

"Fifty-one."

"We got a live one," he said, and smiled.

-end-


	2. Remember me, brahman, as awakened.

Harry opened his front door. His living room had too many windows. Too many holes looking out into the woods. Too many places for owls to peek inside. Curtains were not enough protection. Newspapers, he realized quickly, were perfect. Cheap. Easy to stack. Easy to replace. And easier to hide--no one ever came inside his home, and he kept the stacks behind the eternally-drawn curtains. Before each window stood a wall of thick paper, two stacks of dailies as tall as the drape runners, the bottom third of each stack all yellow and dry. Any electrical outlets not in use, he'd removed, and covered the holes with plywood. There were no photographs or pictures anywhere in the living room. The sofa, and the hideous quilt hanging off its back, were the only immediate signs of Old Harry's life.

More important, Doctor Watson, he thought, is the dog that won't bark.

What wasn't here?

His old kitchen table and chairs (chopped them up for firewood three days after Cooper asked him how Annie was). His television (sold it, although he'd nearly busted it with his ax just for the fun of it). His trash-cans (why bother when it was simpler to drop empty bottles and dirty paper plates wherever he wanted). A sense of pride and care in his surroundings.

I never was too good at that, he thought.

Harry unloaded his revolver, checked the barrel, and locked it up separately from the ammo. He slipped out of his uniform into nothing (easier than doing laundry all the time). He thought about eating, decided he wasn't hungry, grabbed a bottle of whisky on the way to the bedroom.

Here there was more of Old Harry. All his photographs were here, some in frames on the bedside table, some hanging in frames on the wall, most tacked up with push-pins or bits of clear tape. It hadn't felt safe, all those faces in his house for anybody to see. Here he'd blocked the damned windows off with thin boards, more expensive but just as effective as the dailies. Safer for everybody here.

He sat on the edge of the bed, pulled at the whisky bottle, and for a couple of minutes, he studied a corner of his room. Each corner was dedicated to a different person, the people he had the most photos of--if he started from the top corner behind him to his right and rotated around and down, there were corners for his mother, his father, his cousin Fred, Josie, his deputies and secretary (two corners), his first girlfriend (Bess, two and three-quarter years, met in high school, broke up while she was at college, still called each other sometimes when her work at the poison control center didn't get in the way).

The last corner, the one he stared at now, was all work.

Harry, despite not being the brains of recent police department operations, could not give up on the puzzle of how to stop Dale. This puzzle had teeth, sharp ones, and it ate him whenever it felt peckish. One particularly cutting deduction: he had no personal pictures of Cooper from before. The photos in this corner were of two types: official and semi-official pictures by crime-scene photographers, and photos Harry had taken of Cooper since his terrible return. He had no photos of Cooper smiling from before. Only after, a cold, thoughtless grin, like the sound of laughter from an unsmiling mouth.

He couldn't remember how Cooper used to smile.

Holmes's assistant, he decided as he had another belt, had it easy. Holmes just died. How much different would Watson have turned out if Homes came back possessed by Moriarty?

Harry ignored the smile, studied the eyes. Yes. A difference there. The black-and-white crime-scene photos augmented something in Cooper's eyes, the real Cooper, a dark warmth absent from more recent color images. Harry smiled, and took another drink.

Then choked when--was that a knock?

Harry spun the lid on the bottle, tucked it under his bed, threw open the bedroom door, and roared a "Hold on!" at the front door. Took him a few seconds to find where he'd tossed his khakis. Hopped into them, nearly fell over, teach him for drinking on an empty stomach. Considered getting his pistol. It could be Cooper out there. But he had the shotgun loaded and ready by the front door. He went up and peeked out the Judas-hole.

"Andy?"

"Yes," the deputy said.

He opened the door. Andy was dressed in off-duty clothes, all flannel and denim and suspenders. "Everything all right?" Harry assumed somebody had died.

"Yes," Andy said. A smile broke out over his horsey face. "I've been talking to the ghost in my bathroom."

Harry began to shut the door. Andy pushed his foot forward, blocking the door from slamming home.

"I know, Sheriff, I know," Andy said, "but listen. I've been asking him a lot of questions. A lot of it's stuff I don't know at the time. I gotta check out his answers."

"Uh-huh." Harry didn't take his hand off the door-handle, kept pushing against Andy's foot on the off-chance he could dislodge it. Last thing he wanted was his deputy getting an eyeful of the state of his house.

"I asked him something only Cooper would know about Lucy. It was his eyes, see, they reminded me of Cooper's. He wrote to me on the bathroom mirror. He said that he told Lucy he used to smoke cigarettes. Then I asked Lucy about it. And she says Cooper did tell her that--the third week he was here. So I asked the ghost something only Cooper'd know about Hawk. Had to call him in Eugene, and it was kind of confusing, something about dream souls--but Hawk knew what I meant. Now I asked him to tell me something about you, something you know and I don't, and I came to ask you about it, Sheriff. That all right?"

Harry should've remembered, Andy was much cleverer than he looked, sounded, or acted most of the time. He could've called Harry. He came by in person as a check against Harry lying to him over the phone. But his mulish earnestness made him so sincere, it hardly felt like a deception. "Okay, Andy. One question. I'm too tired for much else."

Andy folded his hands behind his back. "The ghost said he honked your nose."

" _Shit_ ," Harry said. He rocked from foot to foot, steadied. "Give me a minute. I'll finish getting dressed. You can drive me to your place."

"Sure thing, Sheriff."

***

"It would appear that Andy's experiences are more than flights of fancy," said Major Briggs at nine-ten.

An hour before, Harry arrived at Andy's, and as it turned out, he was only the first visitor. Hawk, of course, could not return from Eugene, but Harry pestered the deputy for a list of who he'd told about the ghost. Harry called up and convinced Briggs and Pete to drop by. Norma, he knew, was still trying to contain all her personal tragedies and didn't need a ghost on top of it all.

"But how?" Harry asked. "That's what's bothering me. How in the hell did Cooper's soul wind up living in Andy's shower?"

"Maybe he wants to be Bobby Ewing," Pete said.

Lucy giggled.

"Who?" Andy said.

"Bobby Ewing is a character on--" Lucy said.

"Pardon me, Lucy," Major Briggs said, carefully, round hands folded neatly across his knee. "I feel we should redirect our conversation to the problem at hand. When addressing the question of how this came to be, Occam's razor seems like a good tool for our purposes. The simplest explanation is that the Black Lodge is learning how to manifest itself, or its agents, in places other than Glastonbury."

"Nope," said Harry. "I don't smell any motor oil in here."

"That smell might be a peculiarity of BOB's, and not the Lodge, but I'll concede the point. Next simplest explanation, then?"

Silence. Then, after twenty-three seconds, Lucy said, "'Dallas'. He's on 'Dallas'. But, um, I have a question. If this is actually Special Agent Cooper--like, it's _him_ and not just something that knows everything he knows--if that's true, then he must have gotten out. Only he must not have, because he's still in Eugene. So, uh, he can't get out? Maybe he can, sort of, call home sometimes?"

"A little more complicated," the Major said, "but still, a strong hypothesis, Miss Moran. How would we test it?"

Harry didn't care for Socratic questions. "Pry BOB out of Cooper's body. If Andy's ghost goes away and Cooper comes back, we'll know."

"Too many questionably-legal tactics would be necessary."

"We could visit Glastonbury," Pete said. "See if the lay of the land has changed, or if there's--"

"No," Harry said, and for the first time since Cooper's last case, he thought like a cop. "He's calling us from wherever he's stuck, huh? Trace the call, then. If the Lodge gives off signals the Feds can pick up on, why can't Coop?"

This odd group, all gathered in a loose circle in Andy's bedroom, fell silent. Thought that idea over. Harry imagined uncovering a coded signal emanating from his deputy's washroom. Crack the code, exorcise the ghost, send it home. He hoped.

Somebody handed him a cup of coffee. Harry accepted without looking. He used to think all coffee smelled the same, but he swore this cup had a lingering bitterness of decaf about it. He took a drink, turned to thank Lucy, realized he was looking at a stranger. A woman. Kinky dark hair, thin frame, ovular face, broad smile, simple navy suit, black eyes.

"That's close enough," she said.

Harry blinked, and the world went away.

***

"Thank you for the assistance," said Agent Carr. "You've proven invaluable since we discovered you."

"Remember that when I turn in my application," said Audrey. She crossed her mostly-bare legs, rearranged her skirt over her lower thighs. "It was barely even work. Pete talks to himself all the time. I happened to listen in at the right time, and for once, he wasn't just crazy-talking."

"Sure," said Carr, "but you picked the wheat out of the chaff. Good instincts. Let me know when you file that application. I know someone in HR."

"... you have an HR department?"

"Oh, yeah. Lots of insurance claims." Carr nodded, checked her navy-painted nails.

"So... am I allowed to ask what happens now?"

"Yes. They'll wake up with devilish headaches. They'll remember what happened in the past couple of weeks, but not really--it'll sit in their minds like a horrible thing you did in the worst drunk you ever threw. They won't want to remember. And while they're sleeping, we'll clear out Andy's house. No more ghosts."

"Is it him, Agent Carr?"

"I have no idea, and I'm not getting paid to find out."

Audrey didn't have to ask. She imagined Cooper wherever he'd been lost, pressing a phone to his ear, rotary-dial spinning as he dialed in to the nearest weak spot in reality. The nearest soul who'd listen. She imagined Carr and her co-workers cutting the phone line, a snip of wire-cutters, and Cooper was alone. Again.

Fine. She had more money than she could spend in three lifetimes, but no resources for her own investigation. Audrey struck Carr's outfit with a double-whammy of private donations and information. They'd either kill or hire her, and if they hired her, she'd have entire laboratories at her disposal.

Cooper wouldn't have to call home.

-end-

**Author's Note:**

> Although the longer story arc may never be recorded, I am posting this because my partner and I's recent fund-raiser reached our goal. Thank you to everyone who donated. I hope this humble story is a good reward. -Nick


End file.
